50 free Kazakhstan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth, the place where humans first tamed the horse and where the first human went to space, the ancestral home of the apple, and a nation that spent forty years as the Soviet Union's nuclear testing ground. It also has a capital that has changed its name four times, a turquoise flag with a soaring eagle, and a cuisine built on fermented mare's milk. This Kazakhstan trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-seven questions run from geography (Astana, Almaty, Khan Tengri, Karagiye, Lake Balkhash, the Aral Sea, the Ural River) through history (the Botai, the Saka, Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde, the Kazakh Khanate and its three hordes, Russian conquest, the famine, Semipalatinsk, Baikonur, Jeltoqsan, independence, Nazarbayev and Tokayev) to culture (the tenge, the flag, beshbarmak, kumys, the Yasawi mausoleum, Khan Shatyr) and sport (Golovkin, Rypakova, Barys Astana). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know Central Asia. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Kazakhstan?
Astana
The city on the Ishim river has also been called Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, Aqmola and, from 2019 to 2022, Nur-Sultan.
Q 02Which city was Kazakhstan's capital until 1997 and remains its largest?
Almaty
It sits in the foothills of the Trans-Ili Alatau near the Kyrgyz border and has more than two million residents.
Q 03From 2019 to 2022 Kazakhstan's capital bore what name, in honour of the first president?
Nur-Sultan
President Tokayev's first official act was the renaming; it was reversed in September 2022 after the January unrest.
Q 04Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country and ranks where overall by land area?
Ninth
At about 2.7 million km2 it is roughly the size of Western Europe, with fewer than 8 people per square kilometre.
Q 05Kazakhstan and which other country are the only landlocked states with territory in two continents?
Azerbaijan
The Ural River, which crosses western Kazakhstan, is taken as the dividing line between Europe and Asia.
Q 06Which mountain on the China–Kyrgyzstan–Kazakhstan tripoint is Kazakhstan's highest point?
Khan Tengri
Its rock summit is 6,995 m, but the icecap pushes it past 7,000 m, so climbers count it as a 7,000-metre peak.
Q 07The Karagiye trench, Kazakhstan's lowest point, lies roughly how far below sea level?
134 m
Its name means "Black Jaw", and it is the lowest point in all of Central Asia and the former Soviet Union.
Q 08Lake Balkhash in southeastern Kazakhstan is unusual because of what?
Half its water is fresh and half saline
The shallow western part is fresh and the deeper eastern part salty; the Ili river supplies most of the inflow.
Q 09The Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest lake, had shrunk to what share of its original size by 2007?
10%
Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed it from the 1960s, in one of the world's worst environmental disasters.
Q 10The great grassland plain covering a third of Kazakhstan holds what world record?
Largest dry steppe region
It covers about 804,500 km2 of grassland and sandy country.
Q 11The Botai culture of Kazakhstan, from 3700–3100 BC, is credited with what first?
Domesticating the horse
The steppes are also the ancestral home of the wild apple Malus sieversii, the main ancestor of every domestic apple.
Q 12Which nomadic Iranian people, with the Massagetae and Scythians, dominated ancient Kazakhstan?
The Saka
Turkic nomads only entered the region from the sixth century, gradually replacing the Iranian-speaking population.
Q 13Which empire subjugated the territory of Kazakhstan in the 13th century?
The Mongols
Khwarazm's clash with Genghis Khan in 1218 brought the conquest; the Golden Horde later ruled the steppe.
Q 21Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 was launched in April 1961 from which site in Kazakhstan?
Baikonur
The Soviet shuttle Buran and the Mir space station also flew from there, and all Russian crewed launches still do.
Q 22Russia leases its main cosmodrome from Kazakhstan until which year?
2050
The lease covers about 6,000 km2, and the city of Baikonur has special administrative status because of it.
Q 23The December 1986 Jeltoqsan riots protested the local party boss's replacement by which Russian?
Gennady Kolbin
Young Kazakhs objected to Dinmukhamed Konayev being replaced by an outsider from the Russian SFSR.
Q 14The Kazakh Khanate was founded after the 15th-century break-up of which Mongol successor state?
The Golden Horde
Kazakh oral tradition treats that state as its own, and Jani Beg's 14th-century reign as its golden age.
Q 15By the 18th century the Kazakh Khanate had split into how many jüz, or hordes?
Three
The Senior, Middle and Junior hordes were absorbed one by one by the Russian Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Q 16Which Kazakh leader proclaimed himself khan in 1837 and fought Russian rule until his death in 1847?
Kenesary Qasymov
His struggle even echoed in Jules Verne's 1876 novel Michael Strogoff.
Q 17Roughly what proportion of all ethnic Kazakhs died in the Soviet famine of 1930–1933?
38–42%
Between 1.3 and 2.3 million people perished, the highest share of any ethnic group in the early-1930s Soviet famines.
Q 18Kazakhstan became a full union republic of the USSR in which year?
1936
It had been an autonomous republic inside the Russian SFSR since 1920, with its first centre in Russian-populated Orenburg.
Q 19The USSR's first nuclear bomb test in 1949 took place at a site near which Kazakh town?
Semipalatinsk
The town is now Semey; the anti-nuclear movement born there became a major political force in the late 1980s.
Q 20How many nuclear tests did the Soviet Union carry out at its Kazakh test site between 1949 and 1989?
456
That was about a quarter of all nuclear tests in history; the site closed in 1991.
Q 24Where did Kazakhstan stand in the order of Soviet republics declaring independence in 1991?
Last
The declaration followed the failed August 1991 coup in Moscow.
Q 25Who was Kazakhstan's first president, in power from independence until 2019?
Nursultan Nazarbayev
He resigned on 19 March 2019 after nearly three decades and was stripped of his Security Council post during the January 2022 unrest.
Q 26Who succeeded Nazarbayev as president of Kazakhstan in 2019?
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
He took office on 12 June 2019 and consolidated power after the January 2022 protests over fuel prices.
Q 27Into how many regions is Kazakhstan divided?
17
Almaty, Astana and Shymkent are cities of republican significance outside the regions, and Baikonur has special status too.
Q 28What is the currency of Kazakhstan?
Tenge
It was introduced by decree in November 1993 after the rouble zone collapsed and is divided into 100 tiyn.
Q 29What bird soars beneath the sun on Kazakhstan's turquoise flag?
A steppe eagle
The gold sun above it has 32 rays, and the hoist carries a national ornament called qoshqar-muiz.
Q 30How many rays does the sun on the flag of Kazakhstan have?
32
They represent the 32 ethnicities of the Turkic people; the flag was adopted on 4 June 1992.